Bookshelf

By: Melissa Stevens

Ashley is working her last summer at the lake. She’d just graduated, and her new job doesn’t start until August. What she hadn’t counted on was encountering a man who pulled her. Someone she wanted to spend time with, even though she had other things to do.

Jared was recovering, from a gunshot wound and the after effects of the surgery that had saved his leg. He needed to get away from the city, and the stresses and temptations there. He never thought he’d find someone who meant more to him than any of it.

By: Laura Stapleton

Beth Ann Roberts gave her father a deathbed promise to be a good wife to her deceased sister’s husband, Daggart Bartlett. She counted on the sham marriage to help her keep the Roberts family’s land. To her horror, Daggart sells the farm to join the Gold Rush. Beth has little choice but to go with him, never expecting how much her life will change.

Nicholas Granville’s brother convinces him to help lead a group as they travel the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon. Despite his need to mourn his late wife alone, Nick’s heart began healing the moment he saw Beth.

Faced with hardships and death, Nick and Beth struggle to fight an undeniable love.

By: Laura Stapleton

In 1879 Missouri, Jack Dryden’s wife left him just before their adopted children could arrive. When he meets the trio at the train station, he’s unable to send them back to the orphan’s home in New York.

Alice McCarthy takes her responsibilities seriously. She’s in charge of the Hays children and can’t let her feelings about Jack influence her. The rules are clear. She must refuse the adoption. Only, all five of them felt a bond at first sight.

Now they must find a way to bend the rules to continue on as a true family.

By: Debbie Zello

Behind the Manor Door Lies the Reckoning, is a highly suspenseful historical romance from the heyday of slavery in America. It’s the story of a fiery young woman from Boston, Permelia Shaw, who loses the love of her life and goes south to forget about him, only to be swept up in a new romance in Virginia.

Though she is an abolitionist, she thinks she can enjoy a life of wealth and leisure in this society built on bondage as long as she remains true to her conscience and treats the slaves as fellow human beings. That’s not easy to do in 1830’s Virginia, but she defies the norms and builds rapport with a few slaves.

Montgomery Randall is a British slave-trader who escaped from England to avoid the abolition of slavery. He resumes his lifestyle in the rich farmland of slaveholding Virginia. This puts him within the orbit of the Nor’easter, Meli.

Will Virginia society and the slave-trader who lusts for her accept her flouting of their way of life or will they break her will?